Steering Committee

The OASIS LegalXML Member Section Steering Committee coordinates the work of and manages allocated resources to Technical Committees in the Member Section. The Steering Committee is constituted by a combination of TC representatives and elected "at-large" representatives. Each TC selects its own representative to serve on the Steering Committee and the entire membership of the LegalXML Member Section elects three at-large representatives to the Steering Committee annually.

Marc Aronson (maronson@notary.org) is President of the Pennsylvania Association of Notaries (PAN). He instructs members of the American Institute of Banking, Pennsylvania Land Title Association, International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers, Mortgage Bankers Association and others on notary functions. He also serves as President of the United States Notary Association (USNA), serving all 50 states and the District of Columbia. He is an active long-time member of Property Records Industry Association (PRIA)-- he was the private sector co-chair of a PRIA work group responsible for eNotarization and eRecording, and served on the American Bar Association's eTrust subcommittee that created the eNotary White Paper.

Mr. Aronson has also been involved with the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) and is a member and advisor on the development of two important guides, the MISMO eMortgage Closing Guide and eMortgage Guide.

He also is a participant in the organization known as Standards and Procedures for Electronic Records and Signatures, (SPeRS). He is a member of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) Notary Public Administrators (NPA) Committee.

In 2003 Mr. Aronson was the only American notary, and notary association representative, present at the Special Commission of the Hague Conference on Private International Law at The Hague, The Netherlands. This conference concentrated on electronic commerce, electronic notarization and the potential problems of authenticating electronically notarized documents sent from one country to another.

For two years, Mr. Aronson was an active participant as an official observer of a drafting committee of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL). The resultant work, entitled the Uniform Real Property Electronic Recording Act (URPERA) has been adopted by a number of states, numbers of which are steadily increasing. He also was the driving force behind the effort to form a drafting committee to consider a rewrite of the 1982 Uniform Law on Notarial Acts (ULONA). This committee expects to have its' first conference call in early 2008.

Rolly L. Chambers (rolly.chambers@tprr.com) is a partner in the Charlotte, North Carolina law office of Smith, Currie & Hancock, LLP and devotes his practice to construction litigation and commercial matters. He has focused primarily on construction law and construction contract matters for over 15 years. He has substantial experience representing public and private owners, contractors, and construction materials suppliers in trials, arbitrations, and mediations. He is a member of the American Bar Association (Litigation Section and Construction Industry Forum) and the North Carolina Bar Association (Construction Law Section and Litigation Section). He is the American Bar Association's representative to OASIS. Since 1999, Mr. Chambers has been an active contributor to the OASIS LegalXML Member Section. Mr. Chambers received a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a J.D. degree from the Marshall-Wythe School of Law of the College of William & Mary, where he was an Executive Editor of the William & Mary Law Review.

James M. Harris (jharris@ncsc.dni.us) is a senior technology associate for the National Center for State Courts and is an active member of the ECF TC. He has over 25 years of experience in software development and IT operations for state courts. In addition to his consulting work with state courts across the U.S., he has extensive experience in software development for court case management systems, particularly in areas of architecture and infrastructure planning, functional design, and database design. Mr. Harris has also been heavily engaged in development of functional standards and information sharing initiatives for the justice community.

George Knecht (george@pcintellect.com) represents the OASIS LegalXML Electronic Court Filing Technical Committee, for which he is Secretary.

Mark Ladd (mark.ladd@addison-one.com), Chair of the LegalXML Steering Committee, served as the Racine County (WI) Register of Deeds from January 1994 until December 2004. During his tenure as Register of Deeds, Ladd was President of the Wisconsin Register of Deeds Association (1999-2000) and served on the board of directors for the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks (NACRC). He also served as the Public Sector Co-Chair for the Property Records Industry Association's (PRIA) Technology Committee.

On January 15th, 2003 Ladd rolled out Racine County's Electronic Recording System and recorded the first fully electronic real estate documents in the state of Wisconsin.

In July 2004 Ladd joined a software company dedicated to electronic recording systems and continued his work in the electronic recording arena, representing that company to both PRIA and the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) in their efforts to develop the data standards necessary to affect paperless, electronic real estate documents.

Today, Ladd heads Addison/One, LLC, a consulting firm focused on electronic real estate transactions. In this role, Ladd serves as PRIA's Technology Committee Coordinator, placing him at the center of the electronic document recording universe.

Ladd's background as a Register of Deeds, his involvement in the national standard setting process and experience in the private sector provides comprehensive insight into the emerging electronic recording arena.